MINERVA - A Dynamic Logic Programming Agent Architecture

Abstract. The agent paradigm, commonly implemented by means of imperative languages mainly for reasons of efficiency, has recently increased its influence in the research and development of computational logic based systems. Since efficiency is not always the crucial issue, but clear specification and correctness is, Logic Programming and Non-monotonic Reasoning have been brought back into the spotlight. To this accrues the recent significant improvements in the efficiency of Logic Programming implementations for Non-monotonic Reasoning. This paper presents an overall description of MINERVA, an agent architecture and system designed with the intention of providing a common agent framework based on the unique strengths of Logic Programming, to allow for the combination of several non-monotonic knowledge representation and reasoning mechanisms developed in recent years. In [7], the semantics of the multi-dimensional structure and combination of the evolving societal knowledge of agents in described and discussed in detail.